Intel had been investigating selling Intel Security (nee McAfee) for well over a year, so this is hardly a recent development on their part. And regardless of what the Slashdot crowd things of the products' quality, they do have massive amounts of brand recognition in both the consumer and enterprise spaces.

Mr. McAfee had given up the rights to his name when preparing McAfee Associates' IPO and did quite well in terms of how he was compensated. Even back in 1995 he was already trying to get his name back from Bill Larson (then President, CEO and Chairman of McAfee Associates) and having no luck. As much as Bill hated the McAfee name, he realized there was so much money to be made in it, and took the company from $20-30M in revenue to billions of dollars in valuation .

Mr. McAfee's one of the smartest business people I know, and his ability to rapidly absorb data, synthesize it and come up with all sorts of ideas for products is pretty darn amazing, and frankly, with all of the time and effort he's put into being in front of the media, trying to get his name back at this point is a waste of time and shareholder's money spent on lawyers: Due to his recent high-profile activities, there's enough interest in Mr. McAfee that he doesn't need to capitalize on his name, anymore. He could name a company "Spicy Lemon" and still generate media attention because of his involvement with it, just as he's done with all the products he's taken on since returning to the U.S. after fleeing Belize.

The funny thing is that equipping a target with a satellite phone improves the ability to identify them. In the case of a journalist and photographer team operating in Syria a few years ago, it was their satellite phone that allowed their location to be triangulated and subsequently attacked.

I would think it would not be too difficult to come up with some interesting usage patterns of DMs (sending messages in languages commonly used by ISIS, using certain phrases common to ISIS, geoIP location, access only from Tor nodes, proxies, VPN connections and so forth as selection criteria for further intelligence collection. Frankly, using DMs sounds like a great way to be targeted by state security services.

I did not see any mention of a bug bounty program. Is there one? If the federal government would like to not just have its open sourced software reviewed but actually receive reports of bugs, they should consider adding a bug bounty program to encourage programmers to report any errors they find to the federal government, instead of selling it to an adversary.

SonicSpike writes: In a decisive rout for pragmatism over purity, the Libertarian Party has nominated former New Mexico Republican Governor and 2012 nominee Gary Johnson for president. Johnson came within an eyelash of winning on the first ballot, pulling 49.5 percent of the vote, just short of the required majority. (Libertarian activist Austin Petersen and software magnate John McAfee came in second and third, respectively, with 21.3 percent and 14.1 percent.) With sixth-place finisher Kevin McCormick (and his 0.973 percent of the vote) booted from the second ballot, Johnson sailed through with 55.8 percent.

Bruce66423 writes: Uber has agreed a settlement of $10m for misleading advertising about the quality of its checks on drivers compared with others. One particular concern was its absence of finger print based checking.

schwit1 writes: Composite metal foams (CMFs) are tough enough to turn an armor-piercing bullet into dust on impact. Given that these foams are also lighter than metal plating, the material has obvious implications for creating new types of body and vehicle armor – and that’s just the beginning of its potential uses.

Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, has spent years developing CMFs and investigating their unusual properties. The video seen here shows a composite armor made out of her composite metal foams. The bullet in the video is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor piercing projectile, which was fired according to the standard testing procedures established by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). And the results were dramatic.

“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters,” Rabiei says. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” The results of that study were published in 2015.

But there are many applications that require a material to be more than just incredibly light and strong. For example, applications from space exploration to shipping nuclear waste require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation.

Last year, with support from the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Rabiei showed that CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. And earlier this year, Rabiei published work demonstrating that these metal foams handle fire and heat twice as well as the plain metals they are made of.

schwit1 writes: An IP address is not a person, even less so if said IP address traces back to a Tor exit relay. But that's not going to stop the "authorities" from subjecting people with no knowledge at all of alleged criminal activity from being subjected to raids and searches.

It happened in Austria. Local police seized a bunch of computer equipment from a residence hosting a Tor exit node. ICE — boldly moving forward with nothing more than an IP address — seized six hard drives from Nolan King, who was also running a Tor exit relay.

HongPong writes: The PanamaPapers law firm Mossack Fonseca exposed most of their customer service portal's backend, unpatched Drupal code through misconfiguring an Oracle server, also revealing a "portfolio" content type & possible local chat server. These vulnerabilities provide clues as to how the PanamaPapers might have been extracted remotely. This extends stories in Forbes & Wired UK about their security problems.

blottsie writes: In an interview with the Daily Dot on Wednesday, Comey suggested Apple should weaken its encryption on its products to the level of iCloud, which the company can decrypt. “Today, Apple encrypts the iCloud but decrypts it in response to court orders,” he said. “So are they materially insecure because of that?”

Comey also warned against "absolute privacy," saying, "I love strong encryption. It protects us in so many ways from bad people. But it takes us to a place—absolute privacy—that we have not been to before.”